If you’re a small organisation, or only a few people work on your communications, you may think you don’t need a house style guide, but having one prepared can make writing much quicker and easier and helps ensure your communications are consistent, project a professional image and reflect your business values.
What is a house style guide, and why should you have one?
A house style guide is simply a list of rules about writing, specific to your organisation. It can be anything from a single page to a brochure and should include guidance on word usage, spelling, formatting and punctuation, as well as clarification about aspects of writing that have no hard and fast rules.
There are several reasons why we recommend having a house style guide in place:
Consistency: It’s important that all your content looks and sounds as though it’s been written by the same person. As your business grows and more people get involved in written communications, a style guide will help ensure your organisation has a consistent voice, which will support a reputation for professionalism and reliability.
Speed: Having all the answers in one place saves a lot of time when it comes to needing a quick reference or refresher, and with everyone following the same guide, less time should be needed for editing and reviewing.
Even though we’re a small team at Sorted Communications, we still use a style guide in work for our own company, and are always pleased when clients are able to provide us with a style guide for their business.
Tone: How you write can say a lot about your business as a whole. For example, if you choose to use lots of contractions and start sentences with ‘And’ and ‘But’, your business will come across as more modern and friendly. If you’re going for a more formal, authoritative image, then it’s more appropriate to write in a traditional style.
How do you write a house style guide?
If you do decide to write your own house style guide, we recommend starting with an existing guide to use as a template. The AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style are two of the best known, but all major newspapers have one, and you can access these online.
You should then decide which dictionary is going to be your default reference, e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary, Mirriam-Webster etc.
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Then, it’s up to you to supplement the content already in these guides. Here are a few of the categories you’ll need to think about:
- Ambiguous spellings: OK, okay or ok? Email or e-mail? Online or on-line? Tee-shirt, T-shirt or t-shirt?
- Bullet points: Which style are you going to use, and how are you going to punctuate them?
- Capitalisation: Are you going to capitalise job titles? Proper nouns? Departments?
- Dates: 12 May 2016 or May 12th, 2016?
- Formatting: How do you format book and film titles? What about paragraphs? Do you prefer justified or left aligned? How much space do you want between paragraphs? (If you want your communications to be easy to read, we recommend always left aligning copy as this keeps the spacing between words even, which is easier for the brain to process, and helps any readers with a visual impairment).
- Hyphenation: This is a tricky area, as there’s little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. However, it’s worth including notes about your preference in your style guide to make sure your work is consistent.
- Numbers: Will you use all numerals or write numbers out in full?
- Punctuation: Are you going to use the Oxford comma? Are you going to follow a colon with a capital letter? Will you use single or double quote marks?
- Words to avoid: Slang or jargon.
Once your guide is ready, remember to tell your team about it and explain its importance. Keep it somewhere central so that everyone can access it and encourage everyone who writes for your business to read it first.
Can we help?
As well as working to our own house style, we also develop specific style guides for clients that meet the tone and formatting of the copy they want to create, taking into account all the topics discussed above. For example, when we worked with NHS England on a major project which involved more than 50 organisations, we created a style guide for the project in order to ensure consistency of voice throughout.
A couple of hours’ work producing a guide can make a big difference to your company’s image over the longer term. And if you don’t think you’ve got capacity to do it yourselves, contact us today and we can help.
